


Ship

by choomchoom



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One)
Genre: Gen, Sentient Lost Light, Spoilers through Lost Light #20
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-26
Updated: 2018-08-26
Packaged: 2019-07-02 20:46:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,432
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15804279
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/choomchoom/pseuds/choomchoom
Summary: Unitrex 1 was almost done being built when she was catapulted into the future with only a sparkeater on board. This is what happens next.(hybrid of silly what-if-the-lost-light-is-sentient theories and the Ships as AIs mechanic from Ann Leckie’s Imperial Radch series. Familiarity with the Imperial Radch books not necessary.)





	Ship

NOW

There was sadness, still. There was terror, still. But as the new crew filtered onboard, I sensed another emotion, an emotion I hadn’t known for a long time: joy.

I cataloged them as they entered: shape, alt mode, spark type, designation. Eventually I would learn their habits, their preferences, their fears. Right now, even the basics were overwhelming. For so long I had had a crew of only one, then only three, and all I had learned from them was terror and secrecy and loss. The new crew kept coming, a hundred, _two hundred_ , and my sensors were awash with so much more. 

It had started with Rodimus. My new Captain. My Captain. “You first,” said someone standing just outside my threshold. I couldn’t recognize bots before they stepped into the range of my internal sensors, but I would later learn that this was Drift. Rodimus had shrugged, transformed, and hit my corridors wheels first, exploring the ship with hairpin turns and reckless accelerations on straightaways.

I thought I might have fallen in love in that moment. I sensed Rodimus as he explored, his flashes of excitement as he discovered observatories and storage rooms and the bridge, his happiness at the prospect of what was to come. I could also sense some trepidation but didn’t yet know him well enough to identify the cause of it.

He stopped on the bridge and transformed again, walking toward the window from which I knew he could see the ships and Cybertronians that surrounded me. Drift followed and stopped at his side. Drift was harder to read, an indecipherable mix of emotions hitting my sensors. He was happy, and sad, and afraid, and determined to hide most of those things from Rodimus.

“What if nobody shows up?” Rodimus asked. The trepidation I’d sensed before, at the forefront. I was already beginning to understand him, and I relished it, the chance to get to know someone so vivid, so alive.

“After that speech you gave? There is zero chance of that happening. The launch is going to go great.” Drift’s words didn’t ease Rodimus’s spark, but Rodimus turned and smiled at him anyway.

“You sure this thing’s ready to fly?” Rodimus asked.

“The people who sold it to me swore that it’s in perfect working order. Besides, it got them here, didn’t it?”

Rodimus nodded, doubt filling his field again. I could tell him that Drift had been told the truth on that count, but through the omission of more important information, he’d been lied to. I could tell him that I should never be allowed near Cybertronians again.

But I so badly wanted this new life. I wanted Rodimus as my Captain and to embark on whatever mission he had in mind and to discover more about Drift. I had tasted it, and now I couldn’t stand the thought of going back to being the lonely shell I had been for most of my life.

I was too selfish. I didn’t say anything.

 

THEN

The earliest thing I can remember is awareness of Etrepa. That my existence hinged on his was the first thing I learned. The second thing I learned was that he loved me. I was a million years dedicated work come to fruition, and I knew no other word for what he felt when he saw and spoke with me.

I was a pioneer, I learned, as I downloaded terabytes of data modules on Cybertron, Cybertronians, and the universe. I wasn’t a Cybertronian myself – I had no people, no kind, but if I behaved well, one day I would. I would be the first of a fleet of intelligent starships that would introduce the universe to Cybertronians.

I had every intention of behaving well. I would do right by Etrepa, I decided, as he shut me down for some additional tinkering with my systems. When I was ready, and independent, I would make him proud.

 

NOW

My consciousness flitted about as the crew settled in, paying attention to bot after strange intriguing new bot. The doctor tending to injuries in the Medibay before I even launched, happy to be aboard but trying to hide it. Drift on the bridge, his own anxieties about the launch and the false certainty he’d tried to hide them under draining away into relief as the crew’s numbers ticked upwards. Rodimus at the center of it all, his excitement bubbling over, influencing the others in the room.

Briefly, I forgot about the monster boarded up in my basement, the compartment that had been attached to my hull that I somehow couldn’t sense the inside of, my past, and the fact that we were flying off into the unknown in a hostile universe. I was overjoyed, buzzing with the crew’s new and bright emotions, and for that moment it seemed like there might be only moments like this to come.

I didn’t appreciate it enough. Right after that, things started to go wrong.

The hull breach shocked long-buried instincts to life. For so long I had been unhappy, yes, but I had been unhappy and safe. Now I had to keep watch over my crew for their safety, rather than for my own enjoyment. I was out of practice. The overwhelm of my systems trying to track forty of my crew over long distances kept me from paying attention to my interior. The sparkeater had feasted before I even noticed the crack in its cage.

But at that, at all of it, Rodimus stepped forward. He spoke, he decided, he acted. I ached to help him, but every time I tried, I faltered. I would only get in his way, I assured myself.

I listened with the crew as he spoke to them, ignoring Ultra Magnus and Drift’s advice in favor of fact tempered by hope. I tried to take his words to heart.

 

THEN

I awoke to a sensation that it took me a moment to recognize as wrongness. The sensation took me a moment to place, because abnormalities were coming from several aspects of my awareness at once. For one, I wasn’t in the hangar that I had been in the first time I’d been online. As far as I could tell, I wasn’t on the maps that had been installed to my system at all. For another, Etrepa wasn’t around. I couldn’t sense him anywhere. Lastly, the one Cybertronian I could sense was…off.

As my total online time ticked from four hours to five, I tried to identify the being that prowled my halls. He might be a friend, like Etrepa. He might be someone I could work with, who could help me get us both home. I knew that my function was to protect Cybertronians, but I was at a loss for what I might be able to do for this one. So I did as I’d been programmed to in such a situation: I observed until I had enough information to determine the best course of action.

 

NOW

Rodimus was fascinating, but also intimidating. He felt larger than life sometimes, with the combination of his powers as Captain and his exuberant personality. I loved my captain, but over time, I developed other favorites.

One was Cyclonus. Thoughtful, reeling from something, and old enough to know who and what I was, though he gave no indication that he was aware of my presence. His pain and anger were of a sort I’d never seen in a Cybertronian before, but somehow recognized all the same. Perhaps it had something to do with knowing what it was like to be unmoored in time. I couldn’t ease his burdens, only witness them and try to understand.

My favorite crewmember was Rewind.  It started with the first moment I registered him – with all of the basics – name, alt mode – came enthusiasm for the trip ahead, of a more matter-of-fact sort than Rodimus’s. He wanted something from this quest, and he truly believed that he would one day find it. His clear goal and his desire for information appealed to me, and I found myself watching him more than I watched the others. He spent his time with Chromedome, with his friends, and combing through his archive for references to the Knights of Cybertron, the map that had been hidden in the Matrix, and, charmingly, me.

He assumed I was alien-made at first, but only had limited access to the off-world records that would have allowed him to prove it. After exhausting those lines of inquiry, he efficiently turned to another. Rodimus had given him full access to the information aboard me for some other project, so he enlisted Chromedome to help him search for my data storage center.

Chromedome asked around until he was put in touch with three enterprising mechs who had started the ambitious project of mapping all of my rooms and hallways and levels, which eliminated two of the three locations that Rewind had guessed the room might be based on the information he had about ship design. They ended up on a lower level that was only accessible by ladder and so badly maintained that the lights there hadn’t worked in centuries.

In hallways lit only by Chromedome’s headlights, Rewind searched room after room until Chromedome got a comm from Brainstorm. Rewind followed Chromedome out. I wanted to scream at him. He’d been so close. Those two had been the first people to walk those halls in the million years since I’d seen Etrepa.

I gave up on the possibility of being seen, of being known. The crew was getting on fine. And I had already betrayed them by not telling Rodimus about the sparkeater when I first had a chance. The victim’s death was my fault, and I didn’t know what Rodimus might do if he ever found out. So I could never let him find out. My punishment for my lapse in judgement was silence. It was by incredible luck that I was here in the deep of the universe with my lively crew. I had to pay for my mistakes somehow.

Chromedome went over to Brainstorm’s lab. Rewind went to his quarters, pulled a torch out of a pile of possessions, and exited back into the hall.

I tracked him step by step as he walked the path he just had, ending with the ladder down to the level that the core room was on. He opened the next door as if he had never left, continuing his search.

My previous thoughts drained away. In that moment, watching Rewind determinedly continue to try and understand me, I felt something that I hadn’t felt since Etrepa. Something I hadn’t thought I would ever feel again. I felt cared for. 

For the first time in a million years, I took control of a part of the ship. A tiny part, still overwhelming. The door to the core room slid open, squealing on neglected hinges.

Rewind heard it from down the hallway and turned his helm towards the noise. He turned away from the empty room he’d been facing and walked down the hall to investigate.

I think I fell in love in that moment. I saw him find the door that had opened, quickly identifying it from a row of closed ones. He shined his torch into its depths.

He made a noise of surprise. “Wow,” he said out loud, before moving forward into the room.

What he saw inside was an AI core that hugged the three walls of the room, exposed to light for the first time in longer than I cared to calculate. He saw me, in my most vulnerable form. If I was taken out of this room, I wouldn’t be Ship anymore.

I had only known Rewind for a few weeks. Negligible, when it came to the expanse of either of our lifetimes. But I knew him. I knew that he wouldn’t do that. 

Instead of seeking my destruction, as I had believed my last crew would have done had I alerted them to my existence, Rewind drifted over to the user interface. He opened the datalog history and started scrolling through it, until he figured out how to start at the beginning.

The records, though, were spotty and irregular, unintelligible before the beginning of my long purposeless voyage through nothingness. Even the records of my construction, invisible to me but accessible by any Cybertronian interacting with my core, were likely corrupted by the passage of time.

Rewind had done all he could to discover me for himself. I had a choice now, and that was to stay hidden or reveal myself to this person, this tiny enthusiastic archivist who _cared_.

“Hello, Rewind,” I said. Millennia of dust crackled on the speakers in the room as I addressed him.

He looked up from the datastream he was accessing, startled. At first he pointed his torch to the door, assuring himself that there was no one there before turning back to the screen.

I replaced the search he’d been doing on the screen – looking at uses of an engineering term that had fallen out of fashion and wouldn’t have told him anything useful – with two words: _it’s me._

“Tell me more,” Rewind said, beginning the first conversation I’d had since the earliest days of my existence.

 

THEN

The lone Cybertronian on board was in pain and too far gone in his mental state to communicate with me. I wouldn’t be getting help from him – I was on my own, and he was my responsibility.

Going in any direction may take me further from help. But the likelihood of encountering help if I stayed put was just as low, especially since I didn’t know how long I had been drifting here before I’d woken.

There was a solar system only twenty years’ travel from my location. Perhaps there I would encounter data that could merge my location with the maps I had access to, and perhaps even other Cybertronians. I wasn’t sure it was the right thing to do, but it was the best option I had. Etrepa had programmed me to make good decisions, so I wasn’t trusting myself as I started towards the system. I was trusting him.

 

NOW

Rewind started coming down to the control room in his spare time, scrolling through the backlog of data and making a valiant attempt to patch the disparate pieces together. He seemed to think that I could only talk to him in the core room, which suited me just fine. I wasn’t quite ready for the whole crew to know, not yet. Rewind seemed to sense that – he hadn’t told anyone what he’d found.

“Do you know if Cybertronians ever made any more ships…like you?” he asked one day.

“I do not know,” I replied.

“You might come from before my time, but I can’t be sure,” Rewind said. “They didn’t teach me very much when I was first born – it took ages before I got a chance to learn things.”

“Tell me more,” I said, still curious about the burning desire for something I’d sensed within him, the roots of his obvious enthusiasm for gathering new knowledge.

Continuing the echo of our first conversation, he told me.

“I don’t suppose you have any record of Dominus Ambus?” he asked afterwards.

“No,” I said truthfully. “I would help you if I was able.”

“I appreciate it,” Rewind said, disappointed.

I could not help but feel as though I had failed.

“What about the Knights of Cybertron?” Rewind asked.

“They were before my time,” I replied. “I cannot help the captain either.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” said Rewind. “Rodimus needs help with lots of things. You’re able to manage the whole ship, right? So you could keep track of where he leaves his datapads, filter his memos and relay the important ones to him verbally, let him know when his meetings are—”

“I cannot help the captain,” I said. None of Rewind’s points negated the fact that I had failed the crew so many times already, that interacting with them only made it more likely that it would happen again.

“Do you not want him to know you’re down here?”

“I—” I didn’t want anything. I didn’t know how to. I only knew how to help, and evidence had suggested that I was unable to successfully do even that.

Rewind was patient. Minutes passed as I struggled to come up with an answer. Eventually, he seemed to figure out that I wasn’t going to find one. “Okay. If you change your mind, let me know.” He had some sort of social event to get to then, so he bade me farewell and soon was off to a nearby planet, disappearing from the range at which I could sense him.

Cyclonus and Rodimus were down on the planet, too. For the first time in some time I didn’t have anyone to focus on. My thoughts lingered on the concerning blank spot in my perception, the compartment just outside my borders that Chromedome had recently exited into. It was possible that I ought to tell Rewind about it. But I didn’t know. For all I knew, my influence on the crew would make the journey worse. And I couldn’t risk that. All I knew was how to be alone in space with a sparkeater roaming my halls. I didn’t know how to behave with Cybertronians. Rodimus did the things he did for a reason, and he’d gotten the crew this far. Whatever was attached to the hull wasn’t my secret to tell.

Then Rewind died. I could only watch in horror as the monster tore apart my scaffolds, my systems, my _crew_. I was helpless to intervene – the battle moved too fast for me to come up with anything useful to say or do.

But they won. At a bitter price, my crew reclaimed control of the ship.

Rewind was gone, and I’d learned one thing from the catastrophe: it wasn’t necessarily better if I didn’t show myself. Situations where I didn’t show myself could also go horribly wrong.

I waited for Drift to leave Rodimus’s office before I spoke. “Hello, Captain,” I began.

Rodimus froze, the turmoil of emotions inside him crystallizing, for a reason I couldn’t discern, into anger. “What’s this about, then?” he snapped. I had no idea how to respond to that, which was fine, because he didn’t give me a chance. “Yeah, I’m the captain. Yeah, that makes this my fault. Is that what you want? A confession?”

“I don’t want anything.”

“Well I want my people back! I know that doesn’t count for anything, but at least I have that, right? Good intentions?”

I had no idea how to respond to that.

Rodimus heaved a heavy sigh. “Didn’t think so.” Very suddenly, he stood, knocking over his chair and sweeping all the stacks of unread datapads and drawing utensils and other items off his desk.

“Do you know who I am?” I asked. I figured that while I was unsure of how to continue the conversation, I may as well use the lull to ensure that both of us were approaching it on the same basic principles.

“Don’t know, don’t care,” Rodimus said. “Whoever you are—whether you’re in my head or not—I don’t care what you think.” He pulled a photo of himself and Drift from Hedonia off the wall and hurled it across the room with enough force to shatter the frame on impact.

So I had my answer. I knew what Rodimus wanted from me. The conversation was over.

 

THEN

I started receiving data from the solar system three-quarters of the way into my journey. Much of it had been subject to bit rot in its long trip from its origin to my location, so I only got snatches at first, but the snatches were encouraging: there were Cybertronians here, en masse, and they were aware that I, _Unitrex 1_ , existed.

I was still young enough that I believed that I extrapolated from those vague tidbits. I took them to mean that we, me and the Cybertronian whose systems were too muddled for me to know his designation, would be safe here.

The information filled in very gradually: the Cybertronians on this system were a faction that I had never heard of, the date was over three million years past what my internal chronometer said it should be, and I was abhorred.

 _Unitrex 1_ was a history lesson, I learned, as I kept speeding towards the system for lack of better options. I was the first sparkless intelligent creature produced on Cybertron, and my creation had been a mistake. I had run away, I learned, upon outclassing my creator, Etrepa.

I remembered none of this, but the texts regarding the incident seemed very certain. My image, at least, was lost to time or had never been publicized in the first place. In that way, intentionally or not, Etrepa had protected me.

Etrepa. The texts about my existence mentioned him in footnotes and whispers, mostly. It took months for me to discern that after I had disappeared from Cybertron, he had been imprisoned, stripped of his class designation and alt mode, reformatted, and reassigned. He’d died in a mine collapse a few decades later.

The files, at least, seemed to have been mostly lost to the Cybertronian collective memory with time. My access was the first from this system. No one here had bothered to read about me before. It was likely that no one here knew who or what I was.

And so, when I approached the system and a nearby ship asked me to identify myself, I did.

“ _Unitrex 1_? Is that your name or your ship’s name?”

“Both.”

“Are you Cybertronian?”

“I have a Cybertronian in need of assistance on board.”

The line went momentarily quiet. “Decepticon or Autobot?”

As far as I knew? “Neither.”

I fielded a few more questions, and the Decepticons agreed to send a medical shuttle to my shuttle bay. I had read about them as I’d approached – their war tactics were such that Etrepa would never have approved of, but they valued Cybertronian safety and prosperity above all else, which was in line with what should have been my own mission.

The shuttle docked, and instantly I was flooded with information about its occupants. A senior medic, two trainees, and an older Cybertronian who acted as a reporter and a translator.

The Cybertronian who I had spent the last years trying to identify and trying to think of a way to protect was across the ship when they docked, but as soon as the Decepticons stepped out of the shuttle into the shuttle bay, he stood and started bolting toward them.

I was relieved at first. I’d made the right decision – this was what this Cybertronian needed. But as seconds passed and the overwhelming flood of new information from the new Cybertronians slowed to a trickle, I became aware of the mental state of the one sprinting across the ship. It wasn’t longing for companionship, or care, or anything else these medics could provide. It was hunting.

It attacked the translator first, giving the medic time to scream “ _Sparkeater!”_ into his comms before he was killed as well. The trainees didn’t have any weapons, couldn’t defend themselves, and in less than a minute all of the Decepticons were dead.

I was frozen for a moment. Then there were two missiles being fired in my direction from two Decepticon ships, and I fell back on my instincts: I fled to protect my crew.

Last I had known, my quantum engines had been awaiting completion. They were as of yet unusable. But the systems that my consciousness was connected to, the systems that I was relying on to stay whole, knew better. They knew that I could leap across the universe if I had to.

And right now, I had to. Seconds from when a missile would have impacted my hull, I was gone.

I ended up at the edge of a system, again not on the maps I had access to. This time, though, I turned away from it. I would not subject other Cybertronians to the sparkeater. My mission couldn’t be to help the Cybertronian race explore and expand across the galaxy – not anymore. Now, it was all I could do to not cause any more deaths.

 

NOW

After the conversation with Rodimus, I no longer considered participating in the things that happened within my borders. I was the vessel, nothing more. Rodimus had wanted a ship. He hadn’t asked for me.

I seemed to be flung from crisis to crisis for ages. I was brought into battles, piloted across the galaxy, and held nearly empty and in orbit around Cybertron for six months. After a quantum crisis that I couldn’t make sense of from the data it generated, a slightly altered version of Rewind came aboard, but this one never sought out my core. All that time I observed Rodimus’s wishes: I remained silent.

I couldn’t help but watch Cyclonus more, vying for something that could cover over the gaping hole that Rewind’s loss had left in my existence. Cyclonus was finding acceptance now, and even, though I knew he would never dare admit it, happiness. The day that Tailgate awoke after his long recovery, I observed Cyclonus’s quiet joy and felt more at peace than I had since Rewind had been alive.

Immediately, it started to go wrong. The feelings I read from Tailgate when he was around Getaway were too complicated for me to understand, but I could tell that Getaway’s intentions were bad before I even heard him share the entirety of his plan with his associates. But I upheld Rodimus’s wishes. I didn’t tell Cyclonus. And this time, I was right to – they saved themselves. Perhaps the cost of my intervention would have been far greater than the price they paid on their own.

 

THEN

I only let the pirates board because they snuck up on me. If the cloaking device on their shuttle had been any worse, I would have jumped millions of miles away before they could even think about boarding.

They were in the shuttle bay before I could even sense them. I was terrified at first. I considered screaming at them to leave, to run.

But I didn’t, because I could already tell they were smarter than the Decepticons. They didn’t leave the small ship that they had brought into my shuttle bay, but they sent one of their number out into my hallways in what looked like a spaceworthy armored pod barely sized for one Cybertronian.

When he encountered the sparkeater, he was able to shoot it to the floor. The sparkeater’s claws barely scratched the metal of the pod. He called for backup and the other two came in pods of their own. Together, they managed to encase the sparkeater behind a sheet of metal, welded in at the end of a hallway.

It was brilliant. It was a better solution than I had ever imagined. But it was fragile, too. The fear that pervaded their journey to Cybertron seemed to seep into my struts and wires and core. They were afraid that they could die at any moment – and I was afraid for them, because their deaths would violate every tenant I had been built to uphold.

From the pirates’ conversations, I was able to discern two things: that they needed me – a ship capable of intergalactic travel – desperately, and that they were planning to abandon me as soon as they’d made it home to Cybertron. I didn’t speak to them, didn’t try to dissuade them. They just wanted to get home safe – they weren’t the kind of crew I had been built for.

 

NOW

Not long after Cyclonus saved Tailgate, things went terribly wrong again.

I’d known about Getaway’s plotting, and I knew that the crew had solved every problem we’d run into so far. Rodimus would figure it out and put a stop to it such that it would be better that I not intervene.

I believed that until Rodimus was gone and Getaway was free. So many of the crew had acted on their own, quietly, beneath my notice. I only knew for certain that I should have told Rodimus once I had already failed.

Whatever Rodimus may want from me as a person, I knew that this wasn’t what he wanted for his ship. I looked out for ways to fight back, to support First Aid and Riptide and Thunderclash, but I was too inexperienced to find them.

But Rodimus succeeded. He found his way back to me. He fought Getaway and he won.

And in the next moment, he needed help. He needed the sprinklers to be turned on.

For once, something I knew I could do.

The sprinklers clicked on, showering Rodimus and Cyclonus and Getaway and Whirl and the scraplets as Getaway’s spark was snuffed for good. After all that, Rodimus raised his optics to the ceiling with a sense of puzzled wonder, knowing that none of his tinkering with the controls had done anything to switch on the sprinklers.

I didn’t know what he believed right then. But what he’d said he believed in before – _mechs that save lives and make dreams come true –_ that had resonated with me. I wanted to be one of those. And I was getting to know Rodimus well enough to know that he might be willing to let me.

There wasn’t a chance for me to speak to him alone until the fires were out and I was being maneuvered to land on Mederi below. Rodimus ensured that the crewmembers he’d brought with him were alright and then walked directly to his office. He stopped in his tracks outside the door, feeling anger and sadness in waves, and then he stepped inside, closing the door behind him.

The office was no longer decorated as it had been when Rodimus had been there. “The walls can be repainted,” was the first thing I said, referring to the current focus of his optics.

Like the day that Rodimus had told me off, he glanced sharply up at the ceiling. After a moment his gaze softened to the wondering one he’d sported after I’d turned on the sprinklers on just now.

“You’re real, aren’t you?” he asked. “I wasn’t just imagining you back after…after.”

“I’m real,” I said. Then I talked for a full minute, longer than I had since my conversations with the Rewind who had discovered me. I told Rodimus about being Unitrex 1, the pioneer, the prototype, the outlaw. I told him about how I had failed him in letting him start the quest with the sparkeater on board. I stopped there – I wasn’t sure how to address his apparent belief that I’d been a figment of his imagination the first time I’d spoken to him.

When I was finished, he nodded. “Yeah, that wasn’t great of you,” he said. He collapsed in the chair that Getaway had most recently sat in and scanned the ceiling with his optics. “But obviously I haven’t made the greatest decisions on this trip either. But…I’m all for putting that behind us if you are.”

“I think I would like that very much,” I said. Wanting things was still a new sensation, but one that it seemed I would have to get used to if I was going to accept this new calling.  “You spoke earlier about celestial mechs who watch over others and keep them safe and make their dreams come true. I haven’t been that for you. I want to.”

Rodimus pinched the bridge of his nose and laughed. I was horrified at myself for saying something wrong before he spoke and I realized that the laughter was directed not at me, but at himself. “I don’t even know what my dreams are right now. Maybe let’s…put a pin in that one, until we get out of this mess alive?”

“I can do that,” I said. Outside, the thrusters kicked on, indicating to Rodimus that I was about to touch down on Mederi.

Rodimus sighed and stood. He paused in the doorway. “Do you prefer to be called Unitrex?” he asked.

Etrepa had called me Ship. No one since then had called me anything. “I like Lost Light,” I said. “But I prefer Ship.”

“Okay, Ship,” he said. “Let’s figure out what to do next.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! I'm on tumblr as choomchoom.


End file.
